There is the high veld, the middle veld, the low veld, the bush veld, and now thoughts from the thorn veld,
Jacob Dlamini, The Terrorist Album: Apartheid’s Insurgents, Collaborators, and the Security Police (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2020) DURING eight months in 1993, following a verbal command to destroy all operational records, South Africa’s state […]
John Bercow, Unspeakable: The Autobiography (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2020) THE FORMER Speaker of the House of Commons is often described as a Marmite figure. By that measure (in a frank declaration of reviewer interest) I […]
Philippa Garson, Undeniable: Memoir of a Covert War (Jacana, 2020) A CONSTANT presence in this book is the question of the third force. Was it, in the period leading up to South Africa’s first democratic […]
Steve Haake, Advantage Play: Technologies that Changed Sporting History (Arena Sport, 2018) PHYSICS and materials science meet sport in a book written with a strong dose of personal experience, a great deal of enthusiasm and […]
Hermann Giliomee, Maverick Africans: The Shaping of the Afrikaners (Tafelberg, 2020) HERMANN Giliomee deploys the acute observation that nations are created not just from their own dynamics, but also by their enemies. He raises the […]
Moe Shaik, The ANC Spy Bible: Surviving across Enemy Lines (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2020) A MEMOIR might be loosely regarded as autobiography with benefits; or, in more literary terms, poetic licence. Any biographical account described […]
Shirley Gunn and Shanil Haricharan, Voices from the Underground: Eighteen Life Stories from Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Ashley Kriel Detachment (Cape Town: Penguin, 2019) The MK unit known as the Ashley Kriel Detachment (AKD) had a […]
Jan-Jan Joubert, Will South Africa be Okay?: 17 Key Questions (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2019) THIS book has a novel approach to South Africa’s current condition: responses to the most frequently asked questions posed to political […]
George Soros, In Defence of Open Society (John Murray, 2019) A LIST of George Soros’s low-life detractors – from big fish like Vladimir Putin to small fry like Julius Malema flourishing in a groundswell of […]
Adriaan Basson, Blessed by Bosasa: Inside Gavin Watson’s State Capture Cult (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball) THE GRAND corruption of Gavin Watson’s facilities management company, Bosasa, detailed at length in Adriaan Basson’s book will be familiar to […]